Eva Björg Ægisdóttir (trans Victoria Cribb)
Orenda Books, 17 July 2025
Available as: HB, 300pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781916788602
I'm grateful to Orenda for sending me a copy of Home Before Dark to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.
In this new standalone psychological crime novel, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir introduces us to troubled Marsí. In 1977, Marsí dreads the tenth anniversary of her older sister, Stína, disappearing into the Icelandic night.
Marsí has always blamed herself for Stína's loss, because 14 year old Marsí, was conducting an illicit correspondence with a penpal - using Stína's name.
And on the night Stína vanished, Marsí had arranged to meet him...
The first thing to say about this novel is that - as the title hints - it is dark, dark, dark. The setting is almost gothic, the isolated town, and the even more isolated farmstead where Marsí's family still live, breathing suppressed secrets and decades old grief. Marsí's dad makes his living by farming hens, the miserable lives of the poor creatures in their close confinement adding suffering from which she shrinks, and her mum sits in the house drinking alone, mourning her lost career as an actress.
Marsí has her own problems - not all related to the trauma and guilt of losing her sister - and Ægisdóttir cleverly cuts between events of 1966/ 67 (seen from the perspective of each sister), and Marsí's life in 1977. She clearly has an eating disorder, something that goes unremarked in the 70s. Sometimes the two girls' accounts support each other, sometimes they contradict each other significantly. Add in that 70s Marsí is either misremembering, is imagining things, or is a very unreliable narrator indeed, and it's clear that Home Before Dark is a real puzzle box of a book, a story where nothing can be taken for granted and events need to be reconstructed, almost forensically.
All this, and Marsí begins receiving letters again from her former penpal, who now threatens to become her stalker.
I really enjoyed Home Before Dark. It's miles from the typical Icelandic crime mystery (not that I've anything against those!) in that here the investigation of the crime isn't the central thread of the story. Yes, Marsí does make a new attempt here to discover what happened in 1967. (Of course, everyone tells her to leave well alone). And - spoiler! - she does eventually succeed. And that has... consequences. But really, it's her journey to this knowledge - and the re animation of a whole series of relationships (friendships and enmities) from her teenage years, as well as the stirring of long buried family skeletons, that drive the story. Marsí herself emerges as a brilliantly portrayed character, at once very dislikable but also, ion her affliction and desperation, very vulnerable. I changed my mind more times about whether I found her sympathetic than in any book I've read for a long time.
In best gothic fashion, Home Before Dark shows us one family tragedy, but hints at more. As we will eventually learn, behind the apparent catastrophe there are complex family dynamics and unhealed wounds. While the atmosphere of darkness grows, the detail is only revealed slowly, with plenty of time to get to know Marsí, Stína and their (rather strange) parents and circle of teenage friends (seen both in the 60s and, more grown up, later). Ægisdóttir also shows us bits of Icelandic history that are not normally explored in a contemporary crime novel. Some are just intriguing - like that fact that even in the 70s TV shut down on Thursday. Others are darker and look back to a more patriarchal, decidedly unmodern Iceland.
Though it all, Victoria Cribb's excellent translation captures mood and nuance, matching the gathering tension and keeping all the distinct voices clear and recognisable, with their idiosyncrasies and different identities.
An excellent book, and a great escape from the current UK heatwave!
For more information about Home Before Dark, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below.
You can buy Home Before Dark from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones.
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